Triceratops: A Tiny Dinosaur in the World of Behemoths
My crypto journey began with Crypto.com, and I fell in love with the Cronos Chain back in early 2019. If I were ever to create a token of my own, it would be on Cronos, my "home chain." I created TRIKE to unite a community of passionate dinosaur enthusiasts. A few days before the pivotal tweet from Cronos Lab announcing cronos.meme, I was already eager to start a coin. I spent time watching YouTube videos, reading articles, and blogs on how to do it. This research led me to discover pinksale.finance, a platform that has seen significant success with presales on the Solana and BNB chains.
The Beginning of a Journey
When Cronos Lab announced cronos.meme, it convinced me to move forward as it made launching a meme coin as easy as ever. Inspired by the success of other meme coins on the Cronos Chain, I created TRIKE. After laying the foundations such as social media, tokenomics, and a website, I turned to Pinksale to start a presale for a Cronos project. Despite being relatively unknown on Twitter and having limited reach, I set the presale goal to "only" 10k CRO, not expecting to accumulate this amount. To my surprise, the excitement for TRIKE grew rapidly, and in less than a day, the 10k CRO goal was met.
The plans for $TRIKE were set in motion on March 22, 2024. The presale on Pinksale sold out quickly, highlighting the enthusiasm for our project. With a total supply of 100 billion tokens, 75% were allocated to the presale, ensuring a strong start for our adventure.
A Rocky Road
Moving forward and learning along the way, I wanted to set up a staking pool for TRIKE as soon as possible. This would create value for the coin and give people the possibility to earn some passive income. Initially, I tried to develop a functional website with an integrated staking platform myself but often got stuck. So, I turned to Fiverr for help. This is where I faced my first major setback; I lost a significant amount of money without getting my staking pool. The bright side was that I funded this with my private money. Yet, this experience demotivated me initially, making me realize how fun but dangerous the crypto meme space could be.
Though we were never a big community, we had some committed and vocal supporters. It was only fair that I continued to push and grind for those people who invested their money and time in something I created. Together, let's carve our path to success!
The Tiny Dinosaur
TRIKE eventually grew a little bit. Some community members gave useful tips to collaborate with other tokens on the chain and to do more giveaways. This quickly increased our followers on X (Twitter) and our Discord population. In turn, this resulted in a few more holders and buyers.
At times, it was exciting but also terrifying to see "bigger buys." People were buying 2% to 5% of the total supply at once, causing the price to skyrocket. However, this also meant that these big whales could drop the coin in an instant, due to us being such a micro-cap coin. And of course, this happened. But soon, TRIKE found itself in a more sustainable price range.
Eventually, staking became possible thanks to Wolfswapp. I purchased a community vault where people could stake TRIKE for 50% APR. This was well received by the community as we could finally deliver on an old promise: a staking pool. I made sure the dev wallet had less than 5% to turn TRIKE into a true community token.
We continue to look for collaborations, listings, and many more ways to improve TRIKE and get more exposure. But the reality is often hard; we are small, considered a micro-cap coin with low volume. Most platforms aren't eager (yet) to list or whitelist us because we don't offer a lot of value.
Embracing the Journey
I'm not going to say it makes me sad, but it does affect me. Seeing “younger” projects and tokens coming out of nowhere, making big collaborations, and getting pushed by meaningful and impactful Twitter influencers and platforms makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong with TRIKE. Don't get me wrong, I want the Cronos Chain to succeed, so every memecoin that does well is a win in my book. It's just the constant feeling of what can I do better and what do I have to do better. I've made peace with the fact that we are small and growing slowly, but slow growth is still growth.
And that's my point right now. TRIKE will continue to have its ups and downs, just like all tokens. But I will not stop. I will continue to try and improve our token, our project, and our community! I'm extremely excited about where this journey takes me and, of course, where the Cronos Chain and CROfam as a whole will stand in a couple of years!
